Cellphones look to gain a greater voice in an Internet world
By Carolyn Y. Johnson
The Boston Globe
Thursday, August 30, 2007

BOSTON: The cellphone world, dominated by giant telecommunications corporations, is colliding head-on with the Internet, where hackers abound and a good idea can grow into a Google – spawning a full-fledged mobile media industry.

The intersection of the wireless world with the Internet’s openness has long been anticipated, but it is edging closer to reality as new technologies, devices and consumer behavior finally chip away at the telephone’s long legacy as a device used for talking.

The high-profile iPhone launch cast a media spotlight on a device that is more hand-held computer than phone. Google sparred last month with wireless carriers over the rules governing the upcoming auction of the radio spectrum, used to carry calls and data. Sprint plans to build its highly anticipated wireless broadband service, called WiMax, in 2008.

The activity has created opportunities for a bunch of wireless start-ups.

“People say that it’s just a novelty now. But when the PC connected to the Internet, it transformed a word processor to a communication platform, to a media platform,” said John Puterbaugh, founder and chief strategist at Nellymoser in Arlington, Massachusetts, which takes content from places like Comedy Central and VH1 and turns it into video, audio and visuals for cellphones.

Phones are now at a place much like the PC was in the mid-1990s, Puterbaugh said, and Boston is rich with a new generation of consumer mobile companies trying to make a business in a largely undefined space.

Established local industry leaders are key to the burst of new activity.

Two companies that went public this year build the backbone infrastructure that enables carriers to send network data – Starent Networks and Airvana.

M-Qube, a company that built technology to deliver content to phones, was bought by VeriSign for $250 million late last year. Third Screen Media, a company that created a mobile advertising network, was acquired by AOL for an undisclosed amount in June.

But on top of those more established players are start-ups that are so plentiful that the mobile scene is beginning to seem crowded – even as only about 10 percent of cellphone users subscribed to a data plan in the first quarter of 2007, according to Julien Blin of the industry analyst firm IDC.

Many companies offer new ways to get content on a phone – whether it is mainstream music videos or niche content, like a foodie’s favorite video podcast, and their approaches include everything from working with carriers to trying to reach consumers directly.

Buzzwire, a company that received $4 million in venture funding, lets people stream podcasts, live radio, video clips, or other content on their phones. Groove Mobile is a mobile music company that powers the music store run by Sprint and also provides downloads and sharing services to users.

Oxy Systems earlier this year unveiled Phling, a service to allow a user to stream a music collection from a home computer onto a phone. Mobicious raised $4 million in venture backing this year and aims to become the ultimate go-to spot for mobile content – allowing people to search for mobile content and ship it directly to their phones instead of going through carriers’ stores.

“It’s sort of a cross between Google and Yahoo in the early days when they were indexing the Internet; we’re indexing the mobile content,” said George Grey, chief executive of Mobicious.

Already, the cellphone industry has spawned new business – the ringtone industry in the United States was valued at $600 million in 2006, according to Broadcast Music, a performance rights organization. The content industry is also projected to grow more than 60 percent, from $2.3 billion in the United States last year to $3.8 billion this year, according to IDC. But many believe mobile content will have room to expand further as consumers begin to use phones more like they do the Internet.

RazzberrySync creates premium text message content – ranging from beauty and fashion tips for teens to “blitz fiction,” fiction fed to the phone in SMS chapters. And 80108 Media sends insider thumbcasts, including music reviews, event alerts and news to phones.

Many new companies are also bringing new categories of Web content to phones. Mobile social networking sites, which allow people to tap into their online network of friends when they are walking among people in the flesh, may seem a bizarre concept, but a U.S. study by M:Metrics found that already 7.5 million people, or 3.5 percent of mobile subscribers, use such mobile networking Web sites.

MocoSpace has created a social network primarily geared for phones. It says nearly a million people have signed up. RPM Communications is working toward a mobile social network that incorporates voice and sound. This year, the company launched Foonz , a service to quickly set up group conference calls. RPM says Foonz is a stepping stone toward its larger vision of a voice-enabled mobile social network.

Meanwhile, other wireless companies are trying to break the most formidable barrier to cellphone usage – the keypad. Digit Wireless integrates letter keys and punctuation into the keypad found on a standard cellphone. Vlingo introduced a beta version of its voice-based cellphone interface this month.

Nextcode in Concord, Massachusetts, is working on turning a mobile phone camera into a barcode scanner, so users can click a picture of a bar code from a poster or in the pages of a magazine and be directed to a related Web page or get content.

“People know there’s stuff out there they could be doing with their mobile phones – they just don’t know how to find it,” said Jim Levinger, chief executive of Nextcode. “They’re building out a Wal-Mart-sized amount of content for these stores, but a cellphone has a newsstand-sized interface, and you just aren’t going to buy it.”

Texting to Teens from E-Mail

AUGUST 31, 2007

Could full-sentence texting be next?

Web-based e-mail users will soon be sending text messages to mobile phones.

Yahoo! has already announced the feature for Yahoo! Mail users.

“If history is any guide, the other major e-mail providers will soon follow Yahoo’s move,” wrote MediaPost‘s Wendy Davis. “In the past, whenever a major company upgraded its free e-mail capabilities, a rival soon did likewise.”

Ms. Davis noted that when Yahoo! upped the storage capacity of its free Web-based e-mail, Google followed suit within the week.

“The move also serves as a clever way to give users incentives to continue using e-mail, when many teens and young adults are increasingly turning to text messaging or IM in lieu of e-mail,” Ms. Davis wrote.

An Associated Press-AOL study conducted with Knowledge Networks in late 2006 confirmed that instant messaging trumped e-mail for most teens.

The e-mail to text link is important for marketers who target teens.

Teens preferred e-mail 3-to-1 over texting for exchanging information, according to a Harris Interactive survey conducted in December 2006.

Now, e-mail will be connected to text, making texts a PC-to-mobile activity as well as mobile-to-mobile.

Despite a preference for e-mail over texting, teens use a variety of tools to communicate. Making it easy to send texts through e-mail from any Internet connection increases the chances of getting through to them. Typing on a keyboard is easier than on a mobile keypad, so the change may also convert some former texting holdouts.

Moreover, viral text campaigns may now be spread through the Web. Since mobile phones are personal, it is very easy to annoy users with unwanted or irrelevant offers. A text forwarded from a friend, perhaps straight from an e-mail account, stands a better chance of getting opened.

The eMarketer Kids and Teens report will be published in September 2007. Please click here to be notified when it is release

New Eyetracking Heatmap: 6 Ways to Get More Webinar Sign-Ups

By Anne Holland

Webinars are the second-most popular lead generation offer in business-to-business technology marketing this year, topped only by white papers. This is rather stunning, given that nobody had even heard of a Webinar a decade ago. (But then, we’d never heard of iPods either.)

I see a lot of great, informational Webinar promotions out there. Marketers are very good at the e-mailed invites and ads in e-mailed trade newsletters. However, I must admit that nine times out of 10 when I click through to see your landing page … it stinks.

OK, I understand it’s not your fault. The Web or IT department about what you can do on your company site limits you. And when you have ideas for improvements for an upcoming Webinar registration form, they probably say something like, “Get in line.”

However, if they have an opening and you can slip in a Webinar registration page improvement project, print out this heatmap and show it to them (click to enlarge):

This heatmap is from an exclusive study we conducted this spring with real-life business executives. The goal is to determine how you can design Webinar registration pages to get better results.

Here are six lessons you may want to share with your Web designer and online copywriter:

1. The first word in every headline and paragraph has vastly more impact and influence over response rates than any other words in the headline, sentence or paragraph. Look at each first word. Is it the most powerful you can possibly use for the critical position?

2. Replicating important words — such as the topic of the Webinar and keywords for your marketplace (in this case VoIP and Internet Phone) — in multiple positions over the page can improve response. Don’t assume the prospect carefully read everything on the page from start to finish. Assume their eye flickered about and they only spotted perhaps 25% of the information. Make sure highly relevant keywords are present no matter where that eye flickers.

3. Two-column formatting, where both the informational copy and the registration form are above the fold, may help response rates. Definitely test it. However, we would strongly advise against two columns of textual copy. This print-design layout never does well in online eyetracking tests.

4. We would also advise against a third-column such as a vertical navigation bar or additional, unrelated offers above the fold. Landing pages with fewer click options, fewer path decisions, nearly always get far higher response rates.

5. Bullet points work. Bullet points often blow paragraph-style copy (with nearly the exact same words) out of the water. But, you already knew that.

6. Add immediate calls to action, such as a large “Sign Up Today.” and a bold “Register Now” even when you might think the action is self-evident. Being politely pushy can pay off.

Anne Holland is content director of MarketingSherpa.

60% of Mobile Phones Have Cameras

AUGUST 27, 2007

Three in five US mobile users now have cameras built into their handsets, up from about 40% in 2006, according to In-Stat‘s “Camera Phones and Social Networking—A New Global Focus” report.

In-Stat also estimated that more than one billion camera phones would be in use globally by 2008. The firm predicted that mobile blogging and picture sharing would generate mobile data revenue for carriers.

“This growing focus provides financial opportunities for mobile device networks, social networking site operators and software developers,” said Jill Meyers, an In-Stat analyst, in a statement.

“Mobile device networks can benefit through traditional methods of data plans, as well as per-message and per-photo charges,” she said.

A smartphone’s BFF: Teens and tweens

Teen mobile phone usage is way up, and the younger consumers are hungry for new wireless capabilities. Some device makers are finally starting to catch on, writes Business 2.0′s Michal Lev-Ram.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Forget checking email on your cell phone – that’s soo 2004. Today’s teens are doing much more with their mobile devices. Speed texting with their eyes closed is only the beginning, and the technology can barely keep up with their rising demand for new features.

That’s exactly why adolescent consumers are a desirable demographic for phone makers and carriers hungry for data revenues – $5 a month charges for unlimited messaging and $1 song downloads, to name just a few examples – as the cost of a call per minute continues to decline.

In just two years, the number of teenage cellular subscribers has grown by nearly 26 percent (that’s a full 10 percentage points above the growth rate of 45- to 54-year-old customers for the same time period). And there’s ample evidence that teens want advanced capabilities on their phone. The same can be said for tweens – the 8- to 12-year-old crowd.

So why not make a smartphone geared toward teens and tweens? After all, they’re the ones who are driving some of the most advanced mobile trends.

“This is a group that has never known the world without mobile phones, and they’ve come to expect a lot from their devices,” says Mark Donovan, a senior analyst with Seattle-based research firm M:Metrics. “For just about every category of mobile media activity, if you look at the 13- to 17-year-old bracket they’re doing more things with their phones than the average phone user.”

According to a recent survey by M:Metrics, 47 percent of teenagers take photos with their mobile device – that’s twice the industry average. Young adults also access social networks, share pics and videos and browse the mobile Web a lot more than their older, less tech-savvy counterparts.

But despite teens’ hyperactive mobile activities, smartphones like Research in Motion’s BlackBerry (dubbed “CrackBerry” by some addicted users) and Palm’s Treo have been largely geared for the business user – older corporate customers perpetually tethered to their email.

It’s true that smartphones are expensive to develop and build, and that the underage crowd isn’t exactly the one with the most spending power. But recent mobile devices like the slimmed-down Motorola Q and the Blackjack by Samsung have already pulled smartphone prices down – they’re selling for as little as $100 (with a 2-year contract, of course).

The new generation of phones are also sleeker and more multimedia-focused than their predecessors. “They don’t want to walk around with a phone that makes them look like a dork,” says Donovan. “Style and capabilities should go hand in hand.”

It turns out kids don’t want phones that look like they’re made for kids. Case in point: Earlier this year, AT&T discontinued a child-centric, simplistic five-button phone it started selling in 2005 due to what analysts say were lackluster sales.

The maker of the AT&T phone, a Lincolnshire, Illinois-based company called Firefly Mobile, has since gone back to the drawing table to create a more souped-up phone for tweens. Dubbed the FlyPhone, the upgraded device will have a lot more than “call mom” and “call dad” buttons – it will include a camera, MP3 player, games and picture-sharing capabilities.

“Kids aren’t afraid of technology,” says Don Deubler, founder of Firefly. “The new phone allows them to do more things they want to do.”

The FlyPhone will be available through Firefly’s Web site and retail channels like TargetCharts, Fortune 500) stores by late September. According to Deubler, the device will retail for $125 without a contract. (

Other phone makers and carriers are also edging toward more advanced devices for younger consumers. Helio, a small Los Angeles-based mobile operator that actually leases its spectrum from Sprint, launched the Ocean – a youth-centric feature-filled mobile device with two sliding keypads – last March.

With its full-QWERTY keyboard, GPS service and a MySpace application, the Ocean comes close to a smartphone for teens, though at $295 (the price at which the device is offered to new Helio subscribers), it’s still beyond the reach of many of them.

What’s more, as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), Helio’s reach is limited as well. As of last released count, the company had 100,000 subscribers – peanuts compared to any one of the big four mobile operators’ numbers.

So will the big players – Sprint (Charts, Fortune 500), AT&T (Charts), Verizon (Charts, Fortune 500) or T-Mobile – start to catch on and market innovative, lower priced smartphones specifically made for young people?

“Teens have a big interest and activity online,” says Donovan, the M:Metrics analyst. “It’s natural to think you’ll see more smartphone penetration among them.”